Croatian Jewellery
Croatian Heritage
Some things are inherited without ever being written down.
A faith. A language. A shield, a knot of stone, a letter. Carried across borders for centuries — and kept now in gold.
Nobody sits you down and teaches you this.
It arrives at a kitchen table. At Mass. At a wedding, in a language you half remember. In a name you were given before you could object to it.
What survived, survived because someone carried it.
The inheritance
What we carry
Croatian identity has never depended on borders. The borders moved. Empires arrived and left. Families packed what could be packed and went — to Sydney, to Melbourne, to Chicago, to Toronto, to Buenos Aires.
What went with them was smaller, and harder to take away. A faith. A language. A saint's name given at baptism. A shield you would know at fifty paces. A pattern nobody could quite explain but everybody recognised.
None of it began as decoration. These were the things by which people were known, and by which they knew each other.
Some were cut into stone. Some were sung. Some were worn against the skin.
Everything on this page is older than us. That is the whole reason to make it in gold.
9ct Gold Sveti Ante
Faith
Vjera
Kept in the family
Christianity is documented among the Croats from the early Middle Ages. In 879 Pope John VIII wrote to Duke Branimir — the earliest surviving papal letter addressed to a Croatian ruler — and by the tenth century church organisation among the Croats was centred on Split. In the 2021 census, 78.97 per cent of Croatia's population declared itself Catholic.
But the census is not what anyone means by vjera. They mean a bell tower you can see from the far end of the village. A church where the same handful of surnames have been baptised, confirmed, married and buried for two hundred years.
They mean the small things most of all. A rosary kept in a drawer rather than a display case. A saint's name that is also your name, and a feast day that is therefore also your day. A medal put around a child's neck at baptism and not taken off again for eighty years. Grace said quickly before dinner by people not otherwise given to talking about God.
And when families left, that is what left with them. Croatian communities abroad built parishes early, because the parish was where the language, the calendar and the community stayed intact — Mass in Croatian, the same feast days, the same songs, on the other side of the world. Ask anyone who grew up Croatian in Australia what their grandmother wore around her neck. Nobody has to think about it.
A cross was never only decoration. A medal of a saint was never only gold. They were things kept close: given at the beginning of a life, and very often worn to the end of one.
That is why religious pieces sit at the centre of what we make.
Given at a baptism. Worn for a lifetime. Handed on.
Sources: Državni zavod za statistiku, Popis 2021; Hrvatska enciklopedija (Leksikografski zavod Miroslav Krleža).
Create your Saint medal
9ct Pleter Gold Cross
The first gold most Croatian children were given was a cross.
Antemurale Christianitatis
The bulwark of Christendom
From the late fifteenth century Croatia was described as the antemurale Christianitatis — the bulwark of Christendom. Croatian nobles used the phrase of their own lands in a letter of 1494; Pope Leo X applied it to Croatia in 1519. It described a geography as much as a loyalty: a long, narrow country holding a frontier, with the rest of Europe behind it.
That is the world the chequered shield came out of. The Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts records that the chequered arms took shape towards the end of the fifteenth century, formed on the contemporary metaphor of Croatia as a fortress and rampart of Christendom.
Read that way, the chequy is not a game board. It is masonry — course upon course, laid alternating, the way a wall is built.
Stone, fortress, cross, chequerboard, gold. It is a short line, and it runs directly to the things we make.
Sources: Hrvatska akademija znanosti i umjetnosti, Deklaracija o hrvatskome povijesnom grbu, 11 June 2025; S. Ćosić & M. Božić, Nastanak hrvatskih grbova, Gordogan 35–36 (2017).
9ct Gold GRB, on limestone
The Coat of Arms
Šahovnica
The chequered shield
The chequerboard survives in heraldic art from the 1490s: a painted shield at Bolzano in 1494, and one on a house front at Innsbruck in 1495 that is often described as the oldest securely surviving depiction of the Croatian arms. It appears again on the seal of the Kingdom of Croatia attached to the Cetin charter of 1527.
The arms in use today were fixed by law on 21 December 1990: twenty-five red and silver fields, beneath a crown of five smaller shields — the oldest known Croatian arms, then Dubrovnik, Dalmatia, Istria and Slavonia.
That is the state's version, and it is exact. What people actually wear is older and less formal: the pattern itself. On a shirt. On a bell tower. On a headstone in a cemetery sixteen thousand kilometres from Zagreb.
Very few symbols work like that. Most need explaining. This one is read across a room by people who have never lived in Croatia and never will.
A symbol you never have to explain to anyone who shares it.
Sources: Hrvatski sabor; Zakon o grbu, zastavi i himni Republike Hrvatske, Narodne novine 55/1990; D. Bonacci Skenderović & M. Jareb, Glasnik Hrvatskog arhivskog društva 36 (2004).
Hrvatski GRB Pendant · 9ct gold
A deliberate choice
The first white field
Why our GRB begins with white.
Both arrangements occur in Croatian heraldry. The shield painted at Bolzano in 1494 begins with red; the Innsbruck fresco of 1495 — often called the oldest securely surviving depiction of the Croatian arms — begins with a silver, that is to say a white, field. For centuries neither order was standardised.
In 1883 the Sabor of the Triune Kingdom formally specified a silver first field. From 1947 Socialist Croatia used a red first field throughout. When the historical arms returned during the democratic transition, the constitutional amendments of 25 July 1990 defined them only as twenty-five red and white fields, and for several months both orders appeared in public use. The matter was settled on 21 December 1990, when the law fixed the first field red.
The white-first chequerboard is documented from the fifteenth century and was written into Croatian law in 1883. It belongs to the heraldic record, and to no twentieth-century movement.
The arms of the Republic begin with red, and nothing here is offered as an alternative to them. Croatian Jewellery simply reaches further back. Our GRB pieces use the older heraldic form, with the first field white.
Historic symbol
The chequerboard opening on a white — heraldically silver — field
Preserved through generations
Reinterpreted in precious metal
9ct Gold GRB · made in our Sydney workshop
We begin with white not to rewrite history, but to remember more of it.
Sources: D. Bonacci Skenderović & M. Jareb, Glasnik Hrvatskog arhivskog društva 36 (2004); Ustavni amandmani LXIV–LXXV, Narodne novine 31/1990; Zakon o grbu, zastavi i himni Republike Hrvatske, Narodne novine 55/1990.
The Interlace
Pleter
A line with no beginning and no end
Between the eighth and eleventh centuries the stone furnishings of churches along the Croatian Adriatic were carved with interlaced ribbon ornament — altar screens, ciboria, gables, window and door frames. Some of the stones carry names and dates: an architrave from Gornji Muć bearing the year 888 and the name of Duke Branimir; an altar-screen gable carved with the year 895 and the name of Prince Muncimir.
The tradition was not Croatia's alone — interlace of this kind runs from Spain to Hungary — but few places have kept it so close to their sense of themselves. The Museum of Croatian Archaeological Monuments in Split, founded in 1893, holds some twenty thousand objects, and its collection of early medieval interlace sculpture is among the largest of its kind in Europe.
The ribbon crosses over itself, again and again, and never ends. Nobody has ever needed that explained to them.
Carved in stone in the ninth century. Preserved in gold in this one.
Sources: Hrvatska enciklopedija, pleterna ornamentika; Muzej hrvatskih arheoloških spomenika, Split.
Pleter Ring · 9ct gold, on Dalmatian travertine
Patterns outlive the people who cut them.
The Script
Glagoljica
Words before jewellery
The Glagolitic alphabet was devised by Constantine — Saint Cyril — in the second half of the ninth century, so that Slavonic could be written down. Almost everywhere else it faded within a few generations. In Croatia it did not. Croats developed a distinctive angular form of the script, and went on using Glagolitic in liturgical books until 1927.
Around 1100, at Jurandvor on the island of Krk, a limestone slab was carved for the church of St Lucy recording King Zvonimir's gift of land. On the Baška tablet the Croatian name appears for the first time in the Croatian language, in the king's own title.
In 1288 the Vinodol Code was set down in Glagolitic, among the oldest surviving Slavic legal texts. In 1483 the Misal po zakonu rimskoga dvora was printed — the first printed Croatian book, and the first missal in Europe printed in a script other than Latin. Eleven incomplete copies survive.
A thousand years of a script that only Croats went on using. Letters once cut into Croatian stone, now cast in gold.
Sources: Proleksis enciklopedija (Leksikografski zavod Miroslav Krleža); Hrvatska akademija znanosti i umjetnosti, Bašćanska ploča; Nacionalna i sveučilišna knjižnica u Zagrebu; Staroslavenski institut, Zagreb.
Glagolitic collection · in preparation
The Letters
Az, Buky, Vede
Five letterforms in the rounded hand. Croatian scribes gave the script its angular form, the one used in Croatian missals for centuries — and the one a Croatian initial in gold is drawn from.
Az
a
Buky
b
Vede
v
Glagoli
g · from glagol, word
Jest
e
Outlines from Noto Sans Glagolitic (SIL Open Font Licence).
From Croatia to the World
Home, at a distance
Croatians have been leaving for a long time, and taking Croatia with them. The Croatian government's Central State Office for Croats Abroad estimates that some 3.2 million emigrants and their descendants live outside the country, with the largest communities in the United States, Germany, Argentina, Australia, Canada and Chile.
In Australia they came with the gold rushes of the 1850s, among the displaced after 1947, and again through the 1960s and 1970s. At the 2021 census 164,362 people reported Croatian ancestry and 43,302 had been born in Croatia.
The figures are the least of it. A surname nobody at school could pronounce. A recipe with no written quantities. A club with a bar and a bad carpet where your parents met. Mass in Croatian on a Sunday morning. A photograph of a village you have visited twice. A team you support for no reason you could defend in court.
Croatia can be sixteen thousand kilometres away and still be the first thing about you.
Croatian Jewellery is made in Sydney, by people who grew up between two places.
164,362
people reporting Croatian ancestry in Australia, 2021 census
~3.2 million
Croatian emigrants and their descendants abroad, government estimate
1947
the first large post-war arrivals in Australia
Sources: Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2021 Census; Središnji državni ured za Hrvate izvan Republike Hrvatske (estimate, not a census); Museums Victoria, Origins.
Croatian Heritage GRB Pendant
Preserved in gold
Made to be handed on
We are not making souvenirs. A souvenir is proof that you went somewhere. These are meant to do the opposite — to stay in a family, and to be given on by someone who never had to go anywhere to belong.
9ct, 14ct and 18ct gold and sterling silver, made to order in our Sydney workshop and finished by hand. Every piece carries our complimentary lifetime polishing service, because something worn every day should still be wearable in forty years.
The Cross9ct Pleter Gold Cross
The ŠahovnicaHrvatski GRB Pendant
The PleterPleter Ring
The Saint9ct Gold Sveti AnteWhat our ancestors carved in stone, carried in faith and passed through generations, we preserve in gold.